News - Digital Media

Now showing on YouTube: Star Trek.

(Credit: Google)

Google's YouTube has begun testing a dramatic departure in content and advertising, adding 15 50-minute TV episodes from Star Trek, Beverly Hills 90210, and MacGyver and with prominent new ads.

"We are starting to test full-length programming on YouTube, beginning with some fan favorites requested by you," Google said on its YouTube blog on Friday.

It's an experiment in video display and advertising, too, with ads for Research in Motion's BlackBerry and Intel's Centrino chip technology showing prominently on the videos I watched. The TV shows are preceded by a 15-second pre-roll ad, and YouTube will show mid-roll and post-roll ads as well, according to the blog posting. "As we test this new format, we also want to ensure that our partners have more options when it comes to advertising on their full-length TV shows," Google said.

The shows also feature new display possibilities that set off the ads--no doubt the "in-chrome ads" that Chief Executive Eric Schmidt referred to earlier this year when discussing the high priority of making more money from YouTube. A new "theater view" sports bright ads against an otherwise darker screen, wrapping the video in deep red faux curtains. And the "lights-out" mode retains the traditional YouTube interface, but with the darker screen and relatively bright ad.

The TV shows are all from CBS, which owns CNET News.

The content is tagged with a new film strip icon to indicate that it's different from conventional YouTube videos. The icon shows in search results, too.

Update 3:23 p.m. PDT: YouTube's long-form move has been expected for months, and now Google will begin to see how well viewers take to the idea.

Milking more money from YouTube has been a top priority for Google this year, and the new content and ads clearly are a part of that. They also show the increasing sophistication of Google's relationships with studios, which with the exception of litigant Viacom, have been warming to YouTube in some cases.

Schmidt has said the right way to pair advertising with YouTube's vast and fast-growing video collection is the "holy grail."

YouTube features 'theater mode' that lends prominence to the video and the ads.

(Credit: CNET News)

Apple and eBay were two notable stocks to swim against the tide Friday, staying in positive territory throughout the mid-morning through the market's close. Meanwhile investors watched the Dow Jones Industrial Average take one of its most harrowing rides ever.

As the Dow whiplashed investors with its swings that ranged more than 1,000 points during the day, Apple and eBay took investors on an upward path.

Apple intraday trading

(Credit: Yahoo Finance)

Apple closed up 9.08 percent from Thursday, ending the day at $96.80 a share. It gained most of its traction in the final hour of the trading session and was one of the most actively traded stocks on the Nasdaq.

eBay, meanwhile, initially struggled to stay in positive territory, but succeeded and ended the day up 4.82 percent to close at $16.73 a share. The online auction giant was also one of the most actively traded stocks on the Nasdaq.

eBay intraday trading

(Credit: Yahoo Finance)

The CNET Tech Index also ended up for the day, climbing 19.05 points, or 1.67 percent, to close at 1158.14. The tech-heavy Nasdaq squeaked by with a nominal gain of 4.39 points, or 0.27 percent, to end the day at 1,649.51.

For the Dow, after its wild ride, it closed down 128 points, or 1.49 percent, to 8,451.19.

Market watchers attributed the Dow's wild swings in the final hours of trading to a meeting of the Group of Seven nations (G7), which met in Washington to attempt to develop a solution to the credit crunch, according to a report in MarketWatch.

Dow Jones Industrial Average intraday trading

(Credit: Yahoo Finance)

The S&P 500 also closed down for the day, with a 10.70 point drop, or 1.18 percent, to 899.22.

(Credit: Susan Dove/ CNET News)

AOL's Edwin Aoki

(Credit: ZDNet UK)

Edwin Aoki is a technology fellow at AOL, and an alumnus of Apple and of Netscape, where he worked on enterprise products as well as the Communicator browser.

On Thursday, Aoki spoke at the Future Of Web Apps conference in London, alongside figures such as Digg's Kevin Rose and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg. He urged developers to create applications out of passion and for the community, rather than just doing it for money.

ZDNet.co.uk spoke to Aoki just after his speech, to talk about the impact Web applications have had in the enterprise and what trends are emerging.

In the speech you just gave, you suggested that developers should develop applications out of passion, rather than for money. Is this not an idea that is more applicable to the consumer, rather than the enterprise, developer community?

Aoki: Folks have been able to take whatever their passion or their expertise is and apply the technology to writing that, or to disseminating that, through whatever organization their interest is in. We see that a lot in nonprofits, but we also see that a lot in the enterprise.

Wikis are a great example of a technology that often comes in because some folks inside the enterprise want a more efficient way of spreading knowledge and information, and all of a sudden it becomes this great corporate resource. Messaging is another example of something that, we found at our AIM network, often starts with people wanting to have a better way to communicate inside the enterprise. They bring that in, and all of a sudden they find it's a way they can communicate not only inside the intranet, but also with customers and suppliers as well.

I think it is one of these things where the ubiquity and the low cost and the ease of deployment of these technologies really is the supreme environment where you can bring that into an enterprise, just as you can bring that to consumers or even a non-profit.

Those are examples where a trend started in the consumer sector and moved into the enterprise. Is that going to continue?

Aoki: I think that enterprise software is a slightly different beast. I used to do some of that in my time at Netscape and typically they have fairly long sales cycles, they're centrally administered, they are deployed by an enterprise IT department on behalf of a company, and a lot of those folks are starting to embrace those technologies and bring that in on a corporate level as well.

But I think the rapidity of adoption really does start with individuals. It may start from a consumer focus, and it may start from more of a professional focus, but the common thread is that it does tend to start with a person or a small team or a department that is really interested in deploying that technology.

How much do you think the global financial crisis is going to hit the developer community?

Aoki: We're already starting to see, in some sense, the capital markets and some of the venture funding start to be more cautious. Certainly in (Silicon) Valley, there is still an outgrowth of the lessons learned during the first dot-com bust. People are being a lot more cautious. They're scrutinizing the balance sheet a little bit more; they're looking more for those revenue ideas.

At the same time, a lot of the things I was talking about are fueled really not out of money, and they don't cost that much money to start. Both within AOL and with a number of the folks here at the conference, they just start something on a weekend. And they say well, they'd love to just try out how that works. And they find that it's an idea that catches on, and it's an idea that resonates with people, and all of a sudden they're writing something that is larger than they imagined it would be.

We had products that were launched that way in AOL, from the initiative of an individual engineer. We've had enterprise initiatives that have launched that way, because somebody said there's got to be a better way to...whatever.

Such as?

Aoki: Well, I mentioned wikis earlier. Our internal wiki was started by one of our engineers as a way to incorporate a more decentralized approach to documenting the kinds of things that we do. It's been completely embraced by the organization--hundreds of thousands of pages--and it's now an IT-supported function. We have an internal search agent that goes through our intranet that helps aggregate and organize all the information from our myriad sites--that was an employee-started function.

A lot of these things start off as an idea and all of a sudden the organization realizes, hey, this is really helping, this is a great productivity boost. How can we bring this in, how can we help manage that, how can we incorporate it into our corporate systems and bring that into our security and enterprise policies in a way that's not going to stifle that innovation, but in a way that's going to help it grow and help nurture that.

A lot of organizations have been very cool on social-networking sites such as Facebook. How will social networking win over the enterprise crowd, given that many such sites don't yet have the perceived longevity of instant-messaging applications?

Aoki: Social networking--whether it's Facebook or LinkedIn or any specific instance of it--the notion of the social network is going to stick around. You mentioned instant messaging and, if you reduce that back to its bare bones, you have a social graph, that's just graphed through that buddy list there. And that morphed into the Facebooks and LinkedIns of the world, where you're able to check that and see that a little more transparently. That will morph into something else again, I'm sure, as our understanding of those technologies matures.

So it's there. It's something that's part of that. IBM did a study, again looking at wikis in particular, in terms of the number of people that contribute to a wiki and the number of people that are really involved in that. You can trace domain knowledge through that, by looking at who it is contributing to an area, who the comments are coming from, where the edits are going. Wikipedia has a similar phenomenon on the global consumer web.

But again, that also forms a sort of social network, because you're able to understand who your domain experts are in a particular area. If you feed that out onto a graph, you have some additional metadata on your organization there.

So I do think that those kinds of things will evolve organically out of the way technology is used, and frankly I don't think that we know how that will manifest.

A number of organizations have tried to have these social networks on the intranet, creating internal social networks. I don't know that that works unless you have a very large organization, because the value of a social network is in being able to tease out some of these relationships that aren't necessarily obvious. If you have 25 people and know what everybody does and what their skills are, a social network isn't going to layer a whole lot more on top of that.

But for larger enterprises or geographically distributed enterprises, they can have a lot of opportunities where that network is able to expose information that's not necessarily obvious. And I think that IT organizations will realize that and understand that there's value there.

Perhaps one reason instant messaging became more acceptable in organizations was that the networks became interoperable. But this is still not the case with social networking. How important do you think interoperability and the portability of personal data between sites will be? We haven't yet seen the fruits of initiatives such as OpenSocial, for instance.

Aoki: Not yet, but these things take time. There's been a number of folks who have been working very hard on data-portability standards and protocols. Obviously there's that balance between what you want to expose and (conceal), and there are privacy concerns about that, making sure that we have iron-clad authentication and authorization that goes with that.

We talk a lot about data portability and its need, and it's clearly an important aspect for the industry, but it's easy to overlook how deep that rabbit-hole goes sometimes. In order to have good data portability, you need to have strong authorization. In order to have that, you need to have a strong notion of authentication, and in order to have strong authentication, you need to have identity management that everybody agrees on. These are frankly initiatives that people have been working on for the best part of the last decade.

I think that it will come--it's really important--but really what we're starting to see is the depth of how much there is to solve.

David Meyer of ZDNet UK reported from London.

Click here for ongoing coverage from CNET News, 'Tough times for tech'

Updated on 10/10/08 at 11:35 a.m. PST with more details about beginning a voice search on Nokia devices.

You can now speak your search into Yahoo's search widget for Nokia start screens.

(Credit: Yahoo Inc.)

Voice-responsive search has been available from Yahoo's OneSearch 2.0 application for select BlackBerry phones since this last April, but until this week only a few of you could to try it out.

On Thursday, Yahoo slipped voice recognition into the OneSearch 2.0 home-screen shortcut--available for a smattering of Nokia Series 60 phones--and in the Yahoo! Go 3.0 files for select BlackBerry, Nokia Series 40, and Nokia Series 60 models, such as the BlackBerry Curve and high-end Nokia and Sony Ericsson phones. Those using older versions of either of these apps will have to download them anew to get the chatty update.

Operating the voice search is simple--on BlackBerry, just hold down on the green 'talk' button and speak your search term. OneSearch will start scouring Yahoo's database for answers as soon as you let go. Nokia owners can hit the pencil key to get going. Those without pencil keys will launch tier search by pressing the right shortcut key (labeled Y! OneSearch) and speaking or typing into the search box that appears.

Although voice-recognition technology is constantly improving as a whole, many voice searches I've tried using various applications have fallen flat. It helps to launch uncomplicated searches in quieter areas. I've experienced my share of success, but have also had to punch in search terms or edit them in the search field when the speech recognition software bungled a command or when the search engines didn't return the results I had in mind. Still, it's good to have options, and as the technology improves, voice searches will save plenty of typing time and hassle.

You can download the OneSearch 2.0 with a voice start-screen widget for select Nokia Series 60 phones by navigating to m.yahoo.com/shortcut from a PC or phone. The new version of Yahoo Go 3.0 (technically 3.0.4.6), which includes the voice-supporting Yahoo OneSearch widget, can be found for some Nokia and BlackBerry models at get.go.yahoo.com from a PC or the phone's native browser.

The masses have spoken.

And Wal-Mart Stores, the nation's largest retailing chain, retreated from a misdirected and unfair policy. Last month, the company informed customers who bought its DRM-wrapped music that it would no longer issue keys to unlock songs. That meant music buyers would no longer be able to move their libraries to new computers or players. On Thursday, the company reversed that decision and said it would continue to issue keys for "the present time," according to Ravi Jariwala, a Walmart.com spokesman.

OK, let's tally these up. By my count this makes the third behemoth company this year to bend its digital rights management strategies to your will. Yes, you the Internet user, consumer, music fan.

I'm not pandering. That's what happened. The pattern was the same in each case. MSN Music was the first to announce that it planned to stop supporting DRM. Then came Yahoo Music, followed by Wal-Mart. Each announced a plan to kill support. Each was criticized. Each caved in.

Customers pointed out the obvious: There was no expiration date on the music they bought.

If nothing else, the lesson here to you--techies and digital music fans--should be that when you go to the barricades, you can make something happen. When you combine voices, the sound is loud enough to force conglomerates to bend their ears. To their credit, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Wal-Mart listened.

Of course, this isn't the end. Microsoft has committed to supporting the DRM keys for three years. What happens in 2011? And when I asked Jariwala how long does "for the present time" mean, he e-mailed this:

"(Walmart.com) will continue to evaluate options and no decisions have been made at this point. In the meantime, we'll continue to offer MP3 downloads through our online music store and will assist with DRM issues for protected Windows Media Audio (WMA) files purchased from Walmart.com."

It's generally recognized as a good thing that Walmart.com switched to MP3s. But as far as the DRM-wrapped music it once sold, the company could still pull the plug on support whenever it wishes.

And what about the services which continue to sell DRM-laden downloads, such as iTunes? Who knows what the future brings, but if Apple ever considers turning off its DRM support, it should make preparations to take care of its customers.

If not, well, then the people will clear their throats once again and make themselves heard.

New reports say Wal-Mart may have reversed its policy on digital rights management, and will keep servers online for the near future.

Wal-Mart had sent an e-mail to consumers last month that, starting October 9, it would no longer assist with digital rights management issues for protected files purchased from Walmart.com.

That means that anyone who had those music files would still be able to access them on the devices or computers they reside on, but wouldn't be able to transfer them to new devices.

Yahoo and Microsoft had announced similar plans when shuttering their DRM programs, but both companies backtracked after sharp criticism.

Now, reports say Wal-Mart has told consumers that it, too, will continue to support the DRM-protected music.

Engadget has posted an e-mail that Wal-Mart reportedly sent to music customers informing them that "we have decided to maintain our digital rights management (DRM) servers for the present time," and that their customer service team "will continue to assist with DRM issues for protected windows media audio (WMA) files purchased from Walmart.com."

A spokesman for Wal-Mart could not immediately be reached for comment.

One after another, venture capitalists are stating the obvious to the companies they've invested in: Now would be a very good time to keep your money under lock and key.

From Sequoia Capital, which has had parts of its dire economic presentation to its portfolio companies aired out in the press, as reported in VentureBeat and GigaOm, to angel investor Ron Conway in his letter to his portfolio companies, the message is clear and persistent: prepare for the worst.

M&A and IPOs Worldwide and Tech

(Credit: Thomson Reuters)

And that preparation, as Conway noted in his letter to portfolio companies, includes cutting marketing costs, general and administrative expenses and, yes, even layoffs if need be. Sequoia was a bit more dramatic in its message, reportedly using a tombstone with the engraved words "R.I.P. Good Times."

Faced with a tightening credit market and the markets in a virtual meltdown, the VCs that fund these start-ups are busy dishing out sage advice--and companies are taking it to heart much earlier in the game compared with the Internet bubble of 2000.

And for later-stage companies, the M&A route is virtually the only game in town. The IPO scene, in this bearish market, has virtually shut down, with only 44 tech initial public offerings out the door so far this year, compared with 215 deals last year, according to Thomson Reuters.

Start-ups that are fortunate to land another financing round should expect smaller rounds and ones with lower valuations for their company.

And while most tech companies are capital efficient, meaning they need little money to fund their operations, the hot investment area of "green tech" is not as fortunate, noted one venture capitalist.

"One area that is very affected and needs large sums of capital to take off is the novel energy ideas like solar, biofuels, and large-scale energy projects," noted venture capitalist Geoff Yang of Redpoint Ventures.

He added that businesses that plan to rely on the credit markets and finance markets to make their business models work are the ones that are at greatest risk in this current economic climate.

Click here for ongoing coverage from CNET News, 'Tough times for tech'

As Yahoo stock reaches new lows, it appears a private equity fund that owns a small percentage of Yahoo's stock has proposed a new deal for selling the company to Microsoft.

Mithras Capital Partners, which reportedly owns more than 1.9 million shares, or 0.14 percent of Yahoo, suggested a new deal Thursday to sell the company to Microsoft for $22 a share, a 74 percent premium on Yahoo's current stock price, Reuters reported. A Mithras Capital partner plans to send a letter proposing the deal to Microsoft and Yahoo on Thursday night, Reuters said.

Under the deal, the software giant "would unload Yahoo's Asian assets and nonsearch businesses, extract $3 billion worth of cost savings, and receive $2.8 billion of tax benefits," Reuters said. In other words, the software giant would pay $10.3 billion for Yahoo's search business.

In May, Microsoft walked away from its buyout offer of $47.5 billion to snap up all of Yahoo, only later to return with a partial buyout offer of $9 billion to acquire just the company's search assets.

The Internet company on Thursday dipped for the first time into the $12-a-share range, ending the day at $12.65. That followed Wednesday's crossing into the $13-a-share range. Analysts have noted that these crossings into new dollar ranges are psychological landmarks for investors.

Maybe it's advice he heard from a career counselor at Harvard and took to heart: Do what you love, and the money will follow. For now, what Mark Zuckerberg wants most for Facebook is to see it grow and grow and grow some more, without too much fretting over the bottom line.

In an interview with a blogger for the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Facebook's co-founder and CEO minced no words on the matter: "Growth is primary, revenue is secondary."

Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg at the D6 conference in May.

(Credit: Dan Farber/CNET News)

Of course, it could be less a philosophical matter than a practical one for a site that's still sketching out its plans for making money to match its popularity. And bless his heart, even in a tanking global economy, Zuckerberg suggests there's plenty of time for that. He elaborates:

But what every great Internet company has done is to figure out a way to make money that has to match to what they are doing on the site. I don't think social networks can be monetized in the same way that search did. But on both sites people find information valuable. I'm pretty sure that we will find an analogous business model. But we are experimenting already. One group is very focused on targeting; another part is focused on social recommendation from your friends. In three years from now we have to figure out what the optimum model is.

Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer, said essentially the same thing over the summer--the social network's focus is on growth.

How do the two executives divvy up their responsibilities? Zuckerberg said of Sandberg, who joined Facebook about six months ago:

She is an excellent manager. She is very good in building our international organization. I'm focused on the direction of the company, especially of the product development, and the overall strategy. I spend a lot of time working with engineers and product developers. We work together hand in hand.

He also made it clear who's boss: "Me!"

On Friday, Zuckerberg will be taking part in a "fireside chat" at the Future of Web Apps conference in London.

For the full interview, including Zuckerberg's take on Facebook's Windows Live Search deal, its international growth, and the possibility of an IPO, see " Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg: Our focus is growth, not revenue."

Yahoo fell into the $12-a-share-range Thursday, marking the second consecutive day its stock tumbled to a new low.

The Internet company dipped as low as $12.47 a share during intraday trading, before ending the day at $12.65 a share--down just over 8 percent.

Each time Yahoo's stock drops into a new dollar range, analysts have noted that the border crossing serves as a psychological landmark for investors.

Yahoo falls into $12 range

(Credit: Yahoo Finance)

On Wednesday day, Yahoo crossed the $13-a-share threshold. Fear and loathing seem to have taken hold of its stock, with analysts panning the company's prospects in display advertising, given the shaky economy, in addition to a bleak performance on Wall Street.

In the last two hours of trading, Yahoo's shares crossed into the $12 range and quickly plummeted as the broader markets slumped.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average also hit a new psychological mark Thursday, falling below 9,000 for the first time in five years. The Dow ended the day at 8,579.19, down a whopping 678.91 points, or 7.3 percent.

The Nasdaq dropped nearly 5.5 percent, or 95.21 points, to close at 1,645.12, while the S&P 500 closed down 7.6 percent, or 75.02 points, to finish at 909.92.

And in the tech world, the CNET Tech Index, about 30 minutes before the close, was trading down 2.2 percent, or 26.41 points at 1,162.74.

Click here for ongoing coverage from CNET News, 'Tough times for tech'